“I am very different,” she said quietly. “I have lived my life. What I lack in years has been made up to me in horror. I have no desire now but to get rid of this aftermath of years as smoothly and quickly as possible. I do not wish any man, Mr. Ledsam, to talk to me as you are doing.” “You will not accept my friendship?” “It is impossible,” she replied. “May I be allowed to call upon you?” he went on, doggedly. “I do not receive visitors,” she answered. They were walking slowly up Curzon Street now. She had given him every opportunity to leave her, opportunities to which he was persistently blind. Her obstinacy had been a shock to him. “I am sorry,” he said, “but I cannot accept my dismissal like this. I shall appeal to your father. However much he may dislike me, he has at least common-sense.” She looked at him with a touch of the old horror in her coldly-questioning eyes. “In your way you have been kind to me,” she admitted. “Let me in return give you a word of advice. Let me beg you to have nothing whatever to do with my father, in friendship or in enmity. Either might be equally disastrous. Either, in the long run, is likely to cost you dear.” “If that is your opinion of your father, why do you live with him?” he asked. She had become entirely callous again. Her smile, with its mocking quality, reminded him for a moment of the man whom they were discussing. “Because I am a luxury and comfort-loving parasite,” she answered deliberately, “because my father gladly pays my accounts at Lucille and Worth and Reville, because I have never learnt to do without things. And please remember this. My father, so far as I am concerned, has no faults. He is a generous and courteous companion. Nevertheless, number 70 b, Curzon Street is no place for people who desire to lead normal lives.” And with that she was gone. Her gesture of dismissal was so complete and final that he had no courage for further argument. He had lost her almost as soon as he had found her. CHAPTER XIII Four men were discussing the verdict at the adjourned inquest upon Victor Bidlake, at Soto's American Bar about a fortnight later. They were Robert Fairfax, a young actor in musical comedy, Peter Jacks, a cinema producer, Gerald Morse, a dress designer, and Sidney Voss, a musical composer and librettist, all habitues of the place and members of the little circle towards which the dead man had seemed, during the last few weeks of his life, to have become attracted. At a table a short distance away, Francis Ledsam was seated with a cocktail and a dish of almonds before him. He seemed to be studying an evening paper and to be taking but the scantiest notice of the conversation at the bar. “It just shows,” Peter Jacks declared, “that crime is the easiest game in the world. Given a reasonable amount of intelligence, and a murderer's business is about as simple as a sandwich-man's.”